Rocking the list

I have written the mother of all lists. More like what I would call a running order. Every day has a number of activites assigned to it. It's all been through the committee, deliberated, negotiated and enshrined on the front of the fridge. Today's activites were: bake biscuits, family photos, decorate the Christmas tree and make some phone calls re the big day. All done. The house is a bomb site but tomorrow is grinchy housework day. Not that it will be done very thoroughly because I'm off to town to do my Christmas shopping and G will be at home with Grace. She loves to help and runs around the house shrieking and holding tight to whatever you're trying to put away, so I'll be impressed with whatever he gets done. Really. I will. When I was at home with Grace by myself, it took me half a week to do what we can do together in half a day.

It was lovely seeing our mad friend Shaun today. He was the friend who arrived in the week after Grace was born and took this photo, among others. We've been trying to take a family photo that we can send to Gs family in tassie for two weeks now. It's been really hard to get one where we don't look like total dags. At this point I don't care if I look fat or if you can see the black bit on top of my front crown, I just want a photo of us all together with our eyes open.

So we sat around under the plum tree drinking red wine while the rosellas dropped plums on our heads and waiting for the light. He uses a a real ,as opposed to point and shoot type digital, camera and is fussy about such things. It was fun talking about photography but there's so much technical stuff I don't understand. Anyway he's lent me a big pile of books to read. After the light had pretty much gone, he followed Grace around as she explored the less attractive parts of our backyard.

Last week, I did quite a bit of work in the garden. Cutting back water stressed plants, mulching and planting some new things. I'm glad I've kept my planted area small though because this morning I read that we're going to stage three water restriction on new years day. We'll be using lots of bucketed bath and kitchen water and maybe a little hand watering when absolutely necessary. Anyway, it has become my habit when I pull up flowers that have passed their best, like these cornflowers, to hang them in bunches upside down around the garden. I'm quite amazed at how long these have stayed such an intense blue. As they dry out, the seeds are blown around and next spring we should see some self sown seedlings.

2 comments:

I love that backyard "action" shot. You could take your photographer friend out and put yourself in his spot, then you would have a classic aussie backyard portrait. And send it out to everyone, that would be cool.